When the University of Florida beings the fall semester on August 31 Kyle Trask will begin working on his second diploma. The redshirt senior has already completed his undergraduate degree from the University of Florida and will be working on a Master’s degree but his head football coach will be throwing even more graduate-level material at him.
Trask is a good student. He waited four years behind several other quarterbacks, doing his homework and showing up to class without ever getting a chance to show his work on Saturday. When his number was called in the fourth quarter against Kentucky in 2019 he finally got the chance to show what he had been working on the last four years.
Now, heading into the 2020 season, Trask is considered the top returning quarterback in the conference and his experience is something Dan Mullen and the Florida Gators are leaning on as they prepare to play.
“We’re on kind of graduate-level stuff with Kyle right now. I mean he understands the offense and the reads and all of that. It’s how fast he’s getting to everything, the ability to check and change plays,” Mullen explained on Thursday. “The ability to extend the game plan where he has automatics that he can get us to, ‘hey, we like this play against this look’. I don’t love to get into three-way or four-way, or automatic checks and all of that stuff, it’s real graduate-level stuff in playing the position and now he’s managing and leading everybody on the field.”
A knock on Trask in the past has been just that, being able to be a vocal leader on the field. It’s something that, obviously given the success he and Florida had in 2019, isn’t the end all be all for being successful at the position, but something that can help and an attribute that Mullen wants his signal-callers to have.
You can point to the kind of fiery competitors that Tim Tebow and Dak Prescott were on the field but Mullen also had great leadership from Alex Smith and Nick Fitzgerald who were different personality types. Trask is probably closer to the latter two players and that’s fine. Trask has put the work in during the offseason and the best thing Florida has going for it in this strange offseason is Trask’s experience.
“When your quarterback doesn’t have experience is always tricky,” Mullen said. “We always try to go with the pace of our quarterbacks where we’re able to go pretty fast with our installation and everything that we do. You go with the pace of the quarterback.”
Florida will hit the field on Friday for their first scrimmage and, thanks to having Trask at quarterback, should be in a great position to hit the ground running as we hit just under a month before the first game.